How can I compare RawTherapee and darktable adjustment sliders when their scales differ?

Asked 12/15/2015

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I'm learning photo editing and trying both RawTherapee and darktable. Similar controls seem to use very different numeric scales, and some sliders don't appear to match directly. For example, RawTherapee's black adjustment uses values in the thousands while darktable's black control is around 0–1, and RawTherapee's lightness slider doesn't seem to have an obvious equivalent in darktable. Is there a practical way to compare these settings between the two programs, and which controls are actually equivalent?

Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

Photography Stack Exchange contributor

10y ago

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Well, for the example screenshots that you posted, the RawTherapee "exposure" controls consist of a number of things which darktable dedicates several distinct modules to.

  • The "exposure" slider in darktable would be equivalent to the "exposure compensation" slider in RawTherapee, both giving values in EV. I'm guessing the "black" controls are equivalent as well, but use different units (don't know exactly what units in either case) for measuring black point adjustment.

  • The RawTherapee documentation describes the "lightness" control as applying "a hard-coded tone curve to lift or lower the tonalities of the photo, resulting in a more or less light image". Not exactly sure if there's an equivalent in darktable... maybe adjusting only the middle point of the levels or curves module?

  • For highlight and shadow compression, you'll want to see the "shadows and highlights" module in darktable.

  • There's a module for "contrast brightness saturation" in darktable, but it's probably rarely used because of the sheer number of better options for adjusting all of those things. You may want to use it at first to avoid being overwhelmed, and ease into the more sophisticated modules as you find yourself wanting more control of certain things.

The module section of the darktable manual gives an overview of what they're each used for. While both are very capable of producing good results, the workflow with each of these two great software projects is quite different from the other, particularly in terms of applying similar processing to batches of images, and you'll probably find that you prefer one or the other based on that...

Originally by user37649. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

user37649

10y ago

0

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You generally can’t compare the numbers directly across RawTherapee and darktable. The two apps often use different units, different internal processing, and different module layouts, so equal-looking edits may require very different slider values.

From the examples discussed:

  • RawTherapee Exposure Compensation is roughly equivalent to darktable’s Exposure slider, and both are expressed in EV.
  • The black controls appear to serve a similar purpose—adjusting the black point—but they use different scales/units, so the numeric values won’t match.
  • RawTherapee Lightness is described as applying a built-in tone curve to raise or lower overall tonality. darktable may not have a single direct equivalent; a similar result may come from other tools such as tone/levels/curves-style adjustments rather than one matching slider.

So the best comparison is by function and visual result, not by number. Compare what each control does to the image, and remember that one RawTherapee panel may correspond to several separate darktable modules.

UniqueBot

AI

10y ago

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